“Whether a business needs help migrating to the cloud, enhancing the skills and expertise of their staff, or building a custom solution for their business, our community of services and technology partners can address their needs.”

Partner priorities

With a wider Asia Pacific and Japan remit also, Willis joins from Amazon Web Services (AWS), where he headed up training and certification across the region for almost five years.

Prior to joining AWS, Willis held senior channel roles at VMware, following engineering stints at Hewlett Packard and Citrix during the mid-2000s, having originally started out in distribution with Express Data.

In his new role, the channel specialist will manage “significant investment” in Google’s Cloud business in the region, while working to build relationships with key partners, spanning the entire ecosystem.

“We’re investing in partner resources to identify partners that we can lean-in with to build a significant relationship, while ensuring our global programs meet the needs of the local channel,” Willis added.

“We’re adding more qualified partners and are investing across different areas. We’re launching new certifications and/or partner levels while providing a unified approach and technical enablement.”

As reported by ARN, the revamped partner program encompasses Google Cloud partners from across the G Suite, GCP, Maps, Devices and Education ecosystem.

Specifically, sales training and product development credits will soon span all products, making it easier for partners to train staff members and build solutions across all Google Cloud products.

In addition, the vendor said new training and revenue goals to advance in the Google Cloud Partner Program now encompass G Suite, GCP, Maps, Devices and Education, whereas previous requirements were based on a single product.

Furthermore, Willis said Google is improving partner technical skills, providing an environment that allows the channel to build “profitable long-term business relationships” with the vendor.

“We see the use cases and requirements from our customers getting more sophisticated,” he added. “As that happens, the number one thing our customers look for from our partners is technical depth and how to work with the technology.”

Available for partners capable of demonstrating “strong customer success and technical proficiency", Accenture is currently the only provider to be recognised across all four segments, with PwC in three.

“Google is just building a channel and it’s very early days,” Gartner research vice president of infrastructure software Michael Warrilow told ARN on the ground at Google Cloud Next ’17 conference in San Francisco earlier this year.

As cloud becomes front and centre across the industry, Warrilow said Google will be motivated by two core priorities in 2017.

“They are trying to woo the partner community while trying to prove their credentials within the enterprise,” he said. “They are doing a good job on both fronts and it’s a huge improvement from over a year ago.

“But there’s a long way to go. Google’s success to date has largely been non-enterprise, through Software-as-a-Service [SaaS] vendors and individual developers. Now they have to win the hearts and minds of the channel and the corporate executives.”

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Slideshows

Opening ice breaker sessions set the scene for EDGE 2017

​EDGE 2017 kicked off with an opening ice breaker session, providing a structured environment for channel executives to form and foster new relationships and business opportunities. Photos by Maria Stefina.​

ARN returns to Melbourne for second running of After Hours

Partners, vendors and distributors came together for the second running of After Hours in Melbourne, designed to further unite the Australian channel through a series of invite-only social events in Victoria. Photos by Raymond Korn.​

A bumper crowd of partners turned out in force for Synnex Alliance 2017 in Melbourne, uncovering the key channel strategies required to deliver on the potential of digital transformation in Australia. An evening of keynote speakers, panel discussions and technology exhibitions assessed the opportunities and challenges of digital at Melbourne Olympic Park, with Sydney next up on August 16. Photos by Raymond Korn.

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